Online the archives of historic Murano glassworks Seguso Vetri d'arte

The Giorgio Cini Foundation ’s Center for Glass Studies has made available online the rich documentary heritage of the historic Murano glassworks Seguso Vetri d’Arte. An archive composed of more than thirty thousand images, it can now be consulted free of charge on the website archivi.cini.it/centrostudivetro/home along with those already published by artists and designers such as Emmanuel Babled, Dino Martens, Ginny Ruffner, Peter Shire and Vinicio Vianello.

Seguso Vetri d’Arte ’s analog archive consists of a very large corpus of drawings, plans, photographs and furnace catalogs, totaling 13,311 vintage photos, 22.479 drawings, and more than thirty-five thousand digital catalog cards, divided by series - Photographs, Art Glasses, Special Projects, Showroom catalogues - dated between 1933 and 1973, with respect to which a wider fruition is now possible, both for historians and for the general public, through specific queries and advanced research.

Since 1933, the year of its founding, Seguso Vetri d’Arte has been an undisputed protagonist of theart of glassmaking, among the companies that contributed the most to making Murano’s production reality come alive in the 1930s. It was master glassmaker Archimede Seguso (Murano, 1909-1999) who played a key role in this regard, working together with Flavio Poli (Chioggia, 1900 - Venice, 1984), who was the longtime artistic director of the glassworks.

On the one hand, Seguso played the role of inventor, with the birth of new techniques and experimentation, and on the other, Poli became a designer of reference in the glassmaking field, leading the Murano company to extreme simplification of forms and new color combinations. His stewardship was responsible for numerous participations in the Venice Art Biennials, the Milan Triennials, and countless international exhibitions that, as a result, garnered public and critical acclaim and success.

Nicknamed “the most Nordic of Murano designers,” Poli insisted in particular on the production of so-called “submerged” glass, which has now become iconic works of glass art and won Seguso Vetri d’Arte the coveted ’Compasso d’Oro’ award in 1954.

In 2015, the securing, reorganization and drafting of the accompanying means for an initial inventory of Seguso Vetri d’Arte’s immense archival holdings, which had come to the Cini Foundation shortly before. These preliminary operations were then followed by cataloging campaigns and digitization projects in synergy with the ARCHiVe Center, to arrive today at its inclusion in the Foundation’s online catalog, which thus provides a further tool for study in the field of glass art, whose research segments are increasingly broad thanks to the digital and analog archival collections owned by the Glass Study Center.

The indexing and subsequent enhancement of the archival series was based on the most up-to-date international standards and involved a variety of resources: from archival curators to numerous scholars, as well as glass historians and information systems experts.

You can visit the Glass Study Center by appointment, recently moved to the restored Messina Room of the Cini Foundation, by writing to centrostudivetro@cini.it.

Pictured, New Glass Study Center, Messina Room, Giorgio Cini Foundation, Venice.

Online the archives of historic Murano glassworks Seguso Vetri d'arte

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